Fast-forward to 2004. My older brother bought DVDs of fansubbed Naruto (…yeah, they’re pirated). I could say that I fell in love with the uniqueness of it’s art form compared to Western animation, and of course with the story. So imagine my surprise when I found out that the first 2 seasons of Naruto were already shown on ABS-CBN a year ago!

A few months later, ABS-CBN announced that it would pick up Naruto from where they left off. Curious with how the network dubbed it, I watched. And fell in love with the idea of Filipino-dubbed anime itself.

So you see, my transition of my fascination from subbed to dubbed anime is very much different from the usual dubbed-to-subbed or stuck-with-subbed histories of anime fans.

Then came two cable TV channels devoted exclusively to anime: Animax (English-dubbed or -subbed) and HERO TV (Filipino-dubbed). Was, and at times still is, on a joyride.

Right now, my anime fan status has waned a bit. My busy schedule in school and me being a person that easily gets bored are to blame. But I still get to watch anime that are recommended to me by my friends, though that number is very small. And of course, whenever I learn that a major anime title is going to be broadcast in either ABS-CBN or HERO, I try my best to watch it.

I know many anime fans look down on Naruto and his boisterousness and general idiocy, but there is something magical about it to me. And believe it or not you grow to adore even the character of Naruto not just the anime.

Basically: Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing kick started my fangirl-ness.

My perspective of the movements is a bit different from yours, bateszi, since I got into this in the late ’90s when digital fansubs didn’t even exist yet. It was all on VHS. Also other than my Robotech days, my anime watching was through fansub and region 1 (and sometimes region 2) VHS/DVD purchasing. I never dove into the Cartoon Network wave of anime.

ROBOTECH CHILDREN (mid-1980’s)

Like okiu14 I am a Robotech child, which probably makes me one of the older ones here. Like most I had no idea that what I was watching was Japanese animation. I just thought it was the most sophisticated cartoon on tv (this is back when G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Carebears were the afterschool cartoons).

THE ENDING OF VHS FANSUBS (Late 1990’s)

I didn’t become an otaku until around 1997 when an evil college friend introduced me to Bubblegum Crisis OAV. Back then the only kind of fansubs available was on VHS. It used to be so difficult obtaining decent fansubs. You could have the nth generation of a copy of a show and when you popped it into the machine, you could barely make out the pictures or subtitles on your tv. That’s how I watch Memories OAV and Rurouni Kenshin TV. I had the 5th generation of a copy of a copy and the picture quality was horrendous. And remember we’re talking about giant VHS tapes. The way it work back then is that you would need to find forums where people traded fansubs. You’d strike a deal with someone on what you would be trading. Buy the VHS tapes. Record what the person wanted. Ship it off via snail mail and hope the other person came through with your goods. Or you could track down the actual fansubbers and send them money for the VHS tapes they would use to record their fansubs onto. Boy I tell you watching fansubs took a lot of effort and was really expensive back then. It was not accessible as it is today. Not at all.

The following year the same evil college friend took his meager student wage and bought the entire Escaflowne TV series on VHS. Again I was just floored by the production quality and the depth of the storytelling. That same year ADV Films began releasing Neon Genesis Evangelion TV on VHS. This is when they’d stick two episodes on a tape and sell it for $30. I remember the debates and angry fans when episode 25 and 26 aired. All hell broke loose. There were some awesome shows during this period: Escaflowne, Evangelion, Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou, Hana Yori Dango.

THE DIGITAL AGE (2000-present)

I remember in 2000 a new generation of fansubbers began utilizing computers and the internet to create and distribute their fansubs, specifically through IRC. It was a really big deal when fansubbing group Animefactory released Boys Be. They had figured out how to encode files that were pretty decent in audio/video quality yet small in file size.

This period was the peak of my anime fetish. It’s that period where you watch everything you can get your hands on: old and new. And I did. From Ghibli films to 100+ episode tv series to Studio 4C weirdness. My favorite from this period are Azumanga Daioh, Battle Athletes, Banner/Crest of the Stars, Twelve Kingdoms, Full Metal Panic.

This was also the time when anime and manga was becoming popular in the U.S. U.S. companies were picking up Japanese shows left and right. Cartoon Network was converting a new generation of fans. Digital fansubbing was at its peak. The first anime blogs began to appear on the net (Momotato Daioh). Good times.

By 2005 my fetish began to waver. I still watch but not to the addictive degree that I used to. Nowadays I really rely on bloggers like you, bateszi, on deciding what shows to pick up. Xam’d is a current favorite. Last year was Ookiku Furikabutte. The year before that was Black Lagoon.

keep writing, your posts are wonderfully thought-provoking

@Johny: It’s interesting reading about how anime appeared in your country despite the communist regime ruling in Poland. In the UK, we are generally fed the impression that the old Soviet Union was quite xenophobic, especially towards the output of countries preaching the values of democracy, harking back to the days of the Berlin Wall etc. I guess it surprises me that anime made it into your country at all during that time, simply because I don’t really know enough about the Soviet Union to know anything different than what I’m told by the mass media over here. And nice to read another DBZ convert coming out of the closet, I used to watch it on Cartoon Network too. Some day, I hope to go back and watch the whole series again, preferably in DVD quality next time too! Frieza forever!

@Martin: Unfortunately, you may have posted your initial comment just as I was playing around with some new (and already deactivated!) plug-ins for WordPress. Sorry about that! Onto the subject at hand, I’ve often read accounts from people remembering that classic Laputa broadcast during the 80’s, so much so I’m gutted I missed it (or simply can’t remember it), but I can imagine just how awe-struck you must have been as a kid while it was rolling on screen. I mean, I’m an adult now and even I can’t help but be moved by certain scenes in that film, in particular, when Sheeta and Pazu first meet the robot tending the beautiful garden on Laputa. It’s a fantastic children’s film, really.

@Anime Fan: Welcome aboard!

@Celeste: Thanks for submitting such a detailed, illuminating insight into your development as an anime fan, I had a lot of fun reading it and empathized with the point about how, at school, you had to deny watching Sailor Moon. Even today, I don’t exactly broadcast the fact I’m an anime fan, but as I’m now a professional website developer, this blog goes on my CV as proof of my work, so it’s hard to deny!

Also, isn’t it great when you see something as a kid and love it, only to come back as an adult and still love it? Escaflowne is another anime, much like Castle in the Sky, that’s simply great, limitless storytelling no matter what age the viewer experiences it at. Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack is so wonderfully nostalgic, the animation is really bright and detailed, and the story is romantic, exciting and bitter-sweet. With that in mind, I can totally see why you spent so long trying to get a-hold of the Japanese opening, it must have been an exciting time and that comes across in your comment really well.

@Crast: Although I agree with your sentiments to a certain extent, I definitely think there might be a bit more substance to the attraction of anime, more than the admittedly addictive qualities of serial (as opposed to episodic) story-telling at least. I understand what you mean about “the idea of an entire world with an overarching story”, it’s nice to be able to immerse yourself in a story, to escape completely into imagination, but there’s definitely something else, an almost indescribable quality to Japanese anime that I find quite hard to resit. It might be the use of music, the subtlety, or honesty, of the characterisation, the way it portrays human relationships, or even the style of cinematography and use of scenery, whatever it is, I find all of these things all go into explaining why I’m the fan I am today.

I’d be interested to know what you think about Honey & Clover, if/when you see it?

However I did make a choice to watch anime even if I didn’t know what it was. Pokemon, Dragonball Z and Digimon are the only three cartoons that I remember watching consistently when I was about 8 and what got me was the sense of over arcing adventure that set them apart. The other cartoons consisted either of reliable old comedies (Tom & Jerry, Flintstones) or general superhero cartoons (Spiderman, Batman) and both were practically always set in the same few places and the issue of the episode was resolved in at most a few weeks. The idea a cartoon could show a new place each week and work towards an overall goal was really different and really grabbed my attention. Of course the action attracted me as well but a kid show that tried to emotionally invest you in the characters was pretty rare (obviously I didn’t think this at the time. i just thought ‘ooh must watch next week’) and of course the idea that there was an entire world of this stuff was reinforced by the cards and stuff. That idea of an entire world that a cartoon could be set in wasn’t really around in western cartoons.

Quite a lot of that idea of adventures in a completely different world has kept in to my anime watching now. I eagerly devoured Fullmetal Alchemist and am still devouring Naruto, anime quite similar to what I watched before. I’ve also watched Ghost in the Shell, Death Note, Wolf’s Rain, Vision of Escaflowne, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gundam SEED (currently on to Gungrave) all linked by this adventure theme. I never really got into anime that doesn’t have adventure themes, I can’t get into anime comedy or horror.

Cutting it to a summary, the important thing was the idea of an entire world with an overarching story. That was special to anime and I’m glad to see Naruto on Jetix in the UK now.

I’m definitely a victim of the Children’s cartoon age of things. I remember dressing up as Sailor Jupiter in the 1st grade for Halloween, accompanying my religious watching of the show. My first anime was Samurai Pizza Cats at 7:30am, and watching clips of it on Youtube is always a nostalgic experience for me.

I was always the type of child that people considered “bright”, especially in my not-so-well-off school. I read vicariously at a young age. After the Sailor Moon crazed died down in about the 2nd grade for me, I continued watching it long after it was considered “cool” – i enjoyed the fact that there was continuity in the plot (this will be an important thing to note) and really, Sailor Moon started me off on my long obsession with fantasy. As the craze died down, and as I succumed to peer pressure by denying that I watched Sailor Moon, i’d secretly sneek in an episode or two, inbetween reading an increasing amount of fantasy novels.

Though i’d stopped watching Sailor Moon due to being 10 and wanting to fit in, I still watched alot (alot) of cartoons, but it was never enough; no matter how much I watched I was still bored, most of the time. So I read more fantasy novels. By now, I was in about the 4th grade, and already reading at an 8th or 9th grade level (let’s forget the amounts of sex that enter into fantasy novels around that comprehension level, i just needed some entertainment). Around this time, a little series called Pokemon started airing; and the great Japanese wave really kicked in. I satisfied my appetite with Pokemon, Digimon and occasionally Dragonball Z (or plain old Dragonball when it was on, the 1st series was far funnier and less Kamehameha-oriented) and was quite a happy girl for quite a while.

Then two major events occurred, in almost perfect succession: my family got a computer and an internet connection in 1998, and a wonderful, beautiful, world-endingly great anime called Escaflowne started airing on FOX kids. Getting a computer was one thing, it nurtured my small Pokemon obsession with information. Websites around 1998 were still “pages” as opposed to “sites” and as such fairly non-interactive, and with my 28.8k connection even staring took some time. But with the advent of Escaflowne airing on North American TV, the floodgates broke open and haven’t closed since.

I remember sitting with my sister, waiting, for 10 hours (literally, all day) in front of our computer in my parent’s room, waiting for the Japanese version of the Escaflowne opening to load on an anime media downloading site. We would sit and read/act out scripts from the episodes, look at pictures and talk about them, watch the few seconds that had loaded, and wait some more. Finally, when the bounty was ours, we would watch the entire thing, and try to sing the lyrics (for all our effort, learning Japanese later on in highschool was far easier after learning how to pronounce things.) To this day, I can still sing the TV version of “yakusoku wa iranai” at any time, perfectly, off the top of my head.

My sister and I read about other series during this time, also. We read up on about every “most popular” series on the old HTML-and-person powered Anime Web Turnpike, and eagerly awaited our chance to get our hands on them. It was about 2000-2001 by now, and consumer Cable internet was out (I was blessed with parents who, no matter how hard times may have been always made sure we had a good internet connection.) as well as the first glimmers of P2P: the original napster (before anyone understood anything about the internet and copyright, and were just amazed at the technology) as well as others. We took our first dive into subtitled anime around then: Love Hina was our first, and we both found it impossible to keep up with the speed of dialogue, but impossibly fun as well. We started watching Inuyasha shortly thereafter, and it’s been a mainstay in my anime/manga life for the entirety that i’ve been a “fan” really, with the manga finally ending this June (i was more depressed than i thought i’d be)

And ever since then, we’ve both been chugging along (me moreso than my sister) as fandom has gone mainstream enough for a section title in a bookstore to be la belled “manga” and be understood, to the recent collapsing/merging of US distribution companies. An anime con popped up in Vancouver around 5 years ago, and my sister and I have attended as it swelled in size from barely 1000 to almost 5000 this year. On another note, I watched Escaflowne again recently: for years i’d wondered if i was a deluded 11-year-old, and if it was as good as i thought it was. I was delighted to find out that it was everything i’d remembered it to be; i sat there with a smile plastered to my face for 26 episodes.

(whew, long comment!)